Something looks off... You're going to have to deal with this imperfect data to answer this first question.
But first: some notes on pandas. Pandas dataframes are a different beast than R dataframes, here are some tips to help you get up to speed:
Hello all, here are some pandas tips to help you guys through this homework:
Indexing and Selecting: .loc and .iloc are the analogs for base R subsetting, or filter() in dplyr
Group By: This is the pandas analog to group_by() and the appended function the analog to summarize(). Try out a few examples of this, and display the results in Jupyter. Take note of what's happening to the indexes, you'll notice that they'll become hierarchical. I personally find this more of a burden than a help, and this sort of hierarchical indexing leads to a fundamentally different experience compared to R dataframes. Once you perform an aggregation, try running the resulting hierarchical datafrome through a reset_index().
Reset_index: I personally find the hierarchical indexes more of a burden than a help, and this sort of hierarchical indexing leads to a fundamentally different experience compared to R dataframes. reset_index() is a way of restoring a dataframe to a flatter index style. Grouping is where you'll notice it the most, but it's also useful when you filter data, and in a few other split-apply-combine workflows. With pandas indexes are more meaningful, so use this if you start getting unexpected results.
Indexes are more important in Pandas than in R. If you delve deeper into the using python for data science, you'll begin to see the benefits in many places (despite the personal gripes I highlighted above.) One place these indexes come in handy is with time series data. The pandas docs have a huge section on datetime indexing. In particular, check out resample, which provides time series specific aggregation.
Merging, joining, and concatenation: There's some overlap between these different types of merges, so use this as your guide. Concat is a single function that replaces cbind and rbind in R, and the results are driven by the indexes. Read through these examples to get a feel on how these are performed, but you will have to manage your indexes when you're using these functions. Merges are fairly similar to merges in R, similarly mapping to SQL joins.
Apply: This is explained in the "group by" section linked above. These are your analogs to the plyr library in R. Take note of the lambda syntax used here, these are anonymous functions in python. Rather than predefining a custom function, you can just define it inline using lambda.
Browse through the other sections for some other specifics, in particular reshaping and categorical data (pandas' answer to factors.) Pandas can take a while to get used to, but it is a pretty strong framework that makes more advanced functions easier once you get used to it. Rolling functions for example follow logically from the apply workflow (and led to the best google results ever when I first tried to find this out and googled "pandas rolling")
Google Wes Mckinney's book "Python for Data Analysis," which is a cookbook style intro to pandas. It's an O'Reilly book that should be pretty available out there.
Question¶
After a few building collapses, the City of New York is going to begin investigating older buildings for safety. The city is particularly worried about buildings that were unusually tall when they were built, since best-practices for safety hadn’t yet been determined. Create a graph that shows how many buildings of a certain number of floors were built in each year (note: you may want to use a log scale for the number of buildings). Find a strategy to bin buildings (It should be clear 20-29-story buildings, 30-39-story buildings, and 40-49-story buildings were first built in large numbers, but does it make sense to continue in this way as you get taller?)
